Hannah MarkleyStudies in the Novel, Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2026, pp. 121-137This essay explores how debilitated appetites in Wuthering Heights spread among the novel’s characters as diseases. While critics comment on the ways Heathcliff’s hunger engenders Catherine’s anorectic refusals, Hindley’s alcoholism and Frances’s tubercular consumption also respond to Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights, exposing more complex entanglements of physical illness, emotional suffering, and traumatic experience. By situating these appetites in relation to nineteenth-century medical ideas about Anorexia nervosa, inebriety, tuberculosis, and miasma theories of disease, the disabling effects of racial persecution (Heathcliff), gendered confinement (Catherine and Frances), and social dispossession (Hindley) disclose biopolitical distributions of risk along the lines of race, gender, class, and disability that underwrote British racial capitalism, structuring both appetite and embodiment in the provincial scene of the everyday.
Double Fringe First winners Theatre Caddis are set to bring their comedy, Jane Eyre Convention to Edinburgh Fringe this August, following a run in London earlier this Summer.The show is set at the world's first ever Jane Eyre Convention, where we find a group of slightly neurotic Brontë-aficinados [sic] gathered to reenact scenes from their favourite novel.As the group share their passion for all things Jane Eyre, they squabble and fight over the best bits, and conflict over authentic interpretations; also experiencing real emotions as they follow the character of Jane on her journey, including wailing running across the moors! More memorable scenes from the book are relived, as the group attempt to rescue shackled Bertha from the attic.In this fast-paced farce, the enthusiasts feel that they gain new insights and a better understanding of the story of Jane Eyre, and potentially one another. The show promises audiences a funny, uplifting and quirky jaunt - with unrealistic violence, bonnets, and minimal raunch! The show has enjoyed sell-out runs at Lambeth Fringe, and recent shows at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London.The show may also appeal to Brontë fans who enjoyed the recent hype around Emerald Fennel's [sic] adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Theatre Caddis is a London-based theatre company known for staging new, eclectic work, showcasing performances that blend humor, literary homage, and character studies.Jane Eyre Convention is performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 6th - 28th (not 10th and 18th) August at 12.25pm (60 mins), Just The Snifter Room at Just The Tonic at The Mash House venue number 288). (Stephi Wild)
Perhaps no artifact captures the intimacy of Victorian hair work quite like a small bracelet housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Composed of six light brown braids belonging to each of the three sisters – Emily, Charlotte, and Anne – it remains one of the most talked-about pieces of hairwork in existence. The bracelet is technically unwearable now; the clasps are open and one of the braids has come loose. Its power lies not in its intricacy, as the braids themselves are simple up close, but in the identity of its owners. The fact that the Brontë sisters belonged to a lower-middle class family only reinforces how universal the practice was.This very bracelet recently found its way back into popular culture. When Margot Robbie attended a London premiere of Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, she wore a dress adorned with light brown braids inspired by the Brontë piece. Robbie even accessorized her look with a replica of the bracelet itself – a gesture that bridged Victorian sentimentality and contemporary red-carpet fashion in one deliberate styling choice.Hair charms also appear in the literature the Brontës produced. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff removes a lock of Edgar Linton’s hair from Cathy Earnshaw’s corpse’s locket and replaces it with his own, sending a piece of himself and their love off with her spirit. The plan unravels when Nelly, the housemaid and narrator of the novel, entwines Linton’s hair with Heathcliff’s. Scholar Deborah Lutz described this act as opening up the possibility of a postmortem storm of jealousy between the two men. Though it is the only Brontë novel to directly reference mourning jewelry, the scene underscores how central hair work was to Victorian emotional life.
On this episode of “Read All About It!,” the four hosts give our long-awaited review of the film “Wuthering Heights.”Hosts discuss whether the film is a true adaptation, as many characters were omitted entirely from the movie. (Vanessa Hanna)
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Emily BrontëTranslation by Nicole d'Amonville AlegríaForeword by Cristian OlivéEditorial MolinoISBN: 978-8427254589February 2026En los páramos desolados de Yorkshire, el amor y la venganza se entrelazan en una historia tan salvaje como el viento que azota la mansión de Cumbres Borrascosas. Heathcliff, un huérfano marcado por la humillación y el desprecio, consagra su vida a un amor imposible por Catherine Earnshaw, una obsesión que lo consume hasta la destrucción. Emily Brontë creó una de las novelas más intensas e incomprendidas de la literatura, desafiando las normas sociales de la época y dejando a su paso un reguero de censura y escándalos.
Charlotte Brontë was famously “plain” – and possibly also vain. She cared very much about clothes, and there are many insights to be gained from paying close attention to what is left of her wardrobe. In this unusual biography, a nine-year labour of love, Eleanor Houghton even includes a bar chart tracking the many references to clothes in Brontë’s letters. The author, a Brontë scholar, fashion historian, couture milliner and costume consultant on period dramas, would go so far as to call Brontë’s clothes the only surviving “witnesses” to her subject’s life. The “testimonies” in Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes derive from chemically analysing fabrics, painstakingly establishing provenance and poring over everything from Brontë’s intricately stitched baby bonnet to the knitted baby socks given to her for the baby she was carrying when she died.At the age of sixteen, Brontë drew a picture of a woman wearing the kind of frock she probably yearned for, with dropped shoulders, puff sleeves and a high waist. Two years later, in 1834, her brother painted her, in the “pillar portrait”, more soberly attired in a dress matching those of her sisters: dark and sombre, with a high neckline, a large modest collar and sleeves that might seem voluminous in 2026, but, Houghton writes, “lack the exuberance (and internal scaffolding) of their peers”. This painting has “disproportionately shaped our views of … [her] appearance and clothing … This drably dressed Charlotte has haunted us through the years”.The real Brontë did eventually manage to indulge her sense of style, and this book shows her, quite literally, fashioning herself. Houghton notes, for example, how Brontë made a dress for her first job as a governess that fastened at the front, so she could dress without help, in privacy, and inserted large hidden pockets so that she could keep her secrets from her prying employers. In a tour de force exegesis of a “greying corset”, Houghton conjures up Brontë in Brussels, in love with her married French teacher, slipping away to buy a “punitive” corset, which gave her such a narrow waist that, much later, George Smith, her editor, would worry that tight lacing had shortened her life.
Muckle, Lacey Nicole; Siegel, Jonah (chair); McGill, Meredith (member); Luciano, Dana (member); Grossman, Jonathan (member);Rutgers University ; School of Graduate Studies, 2026This project focuses on how the ideological and stylistic strategies that Frederick Douglass used in his first autobiography influenced Charlotte Brontë’s immensely popular novel Jane Eyre (1847). Subsequently, Jane Eyre’s widespread influence created a subsection of mid-nineteenth-century reform novels that contain “the rebellious aesthetic,” a narrative style in which authors imported the aesthetic aspects of rebellion from Douglass by-way-of Brontë without considering how different representational strategies might be necessary for different political projects. The first part of this project explains Douglass’s influence on Brontë, and how Brontë’s novel subsequently reproduces the aesthetics of (rather than actually imagines or incites) rebellion. The rest of this project tracks how Douglass’s rhetorical strategies were refracted through Jane Eyre into a set of novels written between the aftermath and enactment of the British Slavery Abolition Act (1833) and the end of the American Civil War (1865). Techniques created by authors of slave narratives came to shape the way white authors represented different political projects. Ultimately, when these authors attempted to portray other social issues using the style of Douglass’s narrative (mediated through Brontë’s novel), the rebellious aesthetic limited how they could imagine or portray different forms of social transformation.
TheWrap: When you started on the project, what were the things that you and Emerald talked about in terms of the look of “Wuthering Heights?”Linus Sandgren: It started with her, obviously, talking about the film in regards to her vision. I hadn’t read the book, I read her script, and she’s really great at actually explaining with few words, so you get images in your head when she’s talking … you sort of see images when she explains things. With “Saltburn,” she would explain how he’s licking the bathtub, you get images in your head.What was lovely was that the core of the story, the core of the visual storytelling comes from how she saw it as she read the book for the first time, basically, and therefore it was a mishmash of inspirational images that could be coming from Brutalist architecture that she’s seen in her neighborhood with films she’s seen as a kid or other things. She built that story in her head and the dream for her was to make a film that looked like that.She wanted to shoot it all on stage. Basically, to be able to create, at least the world, to look in a specific way and not just shoot in a random house. Everything is derived from her fantasy that has evolved, I’m sure, over the years, and so she had very specific ideas for costume and the design. It would be like the element of a rock and she would have images of rocks, and then images of unclear details of an animal on the wall that you don’t know what it is, but it looks gross, but it’s also beautiful, and it’s actually nothing special. It’s just a piece between the leg and the chest on a pig, but it looks like something else.It was [a] playful and very inspirational room that she had, with inspiring images that were not necessarily in the movie but they were helping us feel the freedom to go much further than you would normally do in in a film that would have to stick to reality – in a way that it was meant to be heightened realism and focus on the love story itself and let the world be expressive for this strong love story, in the same way romantic painters painted dramatic landscapes of man and nature. I think we use the same idea in different ways. Nature and man could be combined in, as much as we could fit, everything to whatever goes on emotionally. And then we had the freedom to be more dramatic than normal, Emerald encouraged [it].From shot to shot, as we went through the story, we decided on what would benefit this scene emotionally to make us feel when we watch these images and the actors in them, how they feel like inside, you always want to do that, but I think to a degree, in this case, it was only what we cared about. That was fun, because that was different from other films, and also, it was a dramatic, emotional and sensual story, which also was different for me.Emerald is the most fun to work with, because it’s always laughter. We always have so fun. Doing this film after “Saltburn” was really a fun challenge, but more challenging for all of us was the technical stuff, because it demanded more technical solutions for everything to work.What were those technical challenges?Well, for example, you decide to shoot on stage and build a house on stage with the interior and the exterior of the house. We shot only landscape shots and the introduction and the hanging and different things on location, but otherwise anytime you were outside around the Wuthering Heights house or Thrushcross Grange, it was on stage.One, you need a variation of weather to both entertain the audience, but also, we saw that as an opportunity to use the weather for the different emotions. That was an important key. It’s like when you play Zelda, then you mix these superpower drinks, you put down like a little bit of Kubrick here and then a little bit of “Gone With the Wind” here and German Expressionism there.I always try to think, which painterly style are we in? “Saltburn” was more baroque, because it could be like a picture that depicts something really hard to watch, but at the same time, you can’t resist watching it because it looks great. In this case, it was like, go all in on romanticism, use the nature with the emotions of the characters and an absolute classic.Also, because we were on stage, that it couldn’t look too artificial. The lighting, in a way, I feel like it should look naturalistic as much as possible, like the correct color temperatures that is in the real world, but an unrealistic amount of dramatic lighting, because it was always somewhat dramatic – either it was foggy or it was like rainy or it was the last sun with the dramatic clouds. Because it happened to be always a little bit dramatic, I guess that is what creates that heightened reality or surrealism in combination with strange sets.When we’re on location, we wanted to maintain that look on location and the technical challenges there would become that it’s sunny and windy, and you want to have a foggy looking or rainy looking scene, we added fog and added rain. All those scenes that look foggy or rainy were a challenge. There was also a challenge to light it in such a way that you had a great flexibility, because we shot on, I forgot now how many days, but it must have been over 40 days on the stages. And, from one day to another, you change, or even from one shot to another, you change direction, and a lot of lights are up there in the ceiling and on pipes and stuff. We needed to always have the flexibility to turn around. And so, we had to add more lights than we needed in a way that I basically peppered the ceiling with the LED lights.It was technical challenges like this because we aimed for creating somewhat realistic but also a dramatic once-a-month type of moment for every shot or every scene. Why it becomes a little more surreal but it was really about trying to capture whatever felt important in that particular scene, emotionally, in the most appropriate way, to enhance that with the visuals, which you don’t always do in films, because sometimes you want it to not be looking the way it feels or you want to do it in more subtle ways or realistic ways. Here it was more all in, which was different and fun. (Drew Taylor)
Fans of period dramas – particularly those inspired by novels from the Brontë sisters – are in for an absolute treat, as one largely overlooked television gem is being celebrated as essential viewing. Having accumulated rave reviews and widespread critical acclaim in the years following its release, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall made its debut on the BBC in November 1996.The three-part miniseries is adapted from Anne Brontë's 1848 novel of the same name and was directed by Mike Barker. Available to watch for free on BBC iPlayer, this outstanding period drama has prompted viewers to declare it surpasses even adaptations of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. (Parul Sharma)
Tianming BaiJournal of Victorian Culture, vcag006, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcag006This essay explores the largely under-read Brontë Parsonage garden. The garden was used as a signifier of the supposed Brontë ‘gloom’ by Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, two inaugurators of the Brontë myth. By paying attention to how the garden was described in their travelogues, I examine the ways in which later pilgrims to the Brontë shrine in Haworth helped consolidate its reputation for bleakness. The Brontë garden featured in their recollections as a liminal space between English domesticity and Yorkshire wilderness, between femininity and creativity, and between life and death. One myth I want to disentangle is the popular image of Charlotte as the angel who laboured dutifully in the Parsonage garden. It may have been Emily Brontë who cared about gardening. I then argue that the Parsonage garden and the Yorkshire moors are places where later occupants and pilgrims can negotiate their affiliations with the literary family, the region, and a version of the nation the Brontës came to embody. Whereas the Haworth moorland embodies a regionalist perception of Northern Englishness as wild and barren, in the afterlife of the Brontës, the garden usually attests to a notion of Englishness as cultivated, delicate, and disciplined. The various transformations the Parsonage garden underwent in the half-century since the 1860s, the various responses to such changes, as well as recent creative refashioning of the image of the ‘Brontës in the garden’, all speak to the transformation of the Brontë myth and the ever-changing affiliations of locals, visitors, and the public with Brontë heritage.
“She should have been a man — a great navigator,” was the opinion of one of her teachers. “She was in the strictest sense a law onto herself,” a childhood friend remarked, with a hint of archness. “I have never seen her parallel in anything,” her sister Charlotte said, sounding half-admiring, half-exasperated.Among a family of weird, wild talents, Emily Brontë was the weirdest and wildest. Brought up in the semi-seclusion of a remote north Yorkshire parsonage, all the Brontës — Maria and Elizabeth, who died in childhood, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who lived long enough to write books, plus poor, spoilt, opium-addled brother Branwell — were shy, but it was Emily, the “tall, long-armed girl” with “liquid… dark blue” eyes whom visitors singled out as particularly reserved or rude.It was Emily who loved the moors so intensely that being away from her Haworth home seemed to make her physically ill and it was Emily whose first “electric” novel (as another Emily — Dickinson — described it) was a love story so painfully strange and addictive that, 179 years later, it’s still making bank for Hollywood. This year, thanks to a bump from Emerald Fennell’s wickedly provocative film, Wuthering Heights has sold 123,265 copies in the UK. In a world where no one reads any more, nearly 1,000 people a day are still buying Emily’s book.Elusive Emily is also the Brontë sister who left the fewest traces — almost all of her letters and thousands of pages of her prose and poetry are missing, probably destroyed. This might explain why This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, is “the first comprehensive biography” of Emily in more than two decades, as its publisher rather grandly proclaims.The Brontës weren’t really native Yorkshire, but the children of transplants. Their spectacularly driven father, Patrick, born in a two-room cottage in Co Down, got himself to the University of Cambridge, published a book of poetry and later displayed an unusual if patchy interest in educating his daughters. Their mother, Maria, also a writer, came from a well-to-do family in Penzance and married down with Patrick, something Cathy, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, refuses to do despite being madly in love with Heathcliff. Was this perhaps a sign of Emily heeding her mother’s cautionary tale? After having six children in quick succession, Maria died from cancer in 1821 when Emily was three, in “more agonising pain than I ever saw anyone endure”, according to her husband.Death and trauma hang over Emily’s early years: aged six, she joined her sisters at Cowan Bridge — the school whose tough regimen would inspire nightmarish Lowood in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre — where snow soaked into the pupils’ shoes as they walked to church, condemning them to chilblains. “Much worse happened in schools of the time,” Lutz says bracingly, which I’m sure is true, but perhaps wouldn’t have been much consolation to Emily when her two oldest sisters developed consumption and died, aged eleven and ten.Such experiences shaped her gothic imagination: mother and daughters were buried in the family vault beneath the stone floor of Haworth church (a privilege accorded the parson), so that three times as a very young child, Emily saw a crypt open and her loved ones disappear inside it. Tombs haunt her work, as Lutz points out. Twice in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff digs up his beloved Cathy’s grave.After this almost unimaginably grim start, Emily’s childhood improved. Their father took the girls out of school — to lose two daughters may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose any more would have looked like carelessness — and their mother’s sister arrived from Cornwall to look after them. In a Brontë novel she would have been a wicked stepmother figure, like Jane Eyre’s Mrs Reed, but Aunt Branwell, though strict, was adored by the children. After lessons from their father — Emily showed an unladylike aptitude for geometry and geography and later, rather delightfully, managed the family’s railway investments — their aunt would read aloud to them from newspapers and Walter Scott histories as they sat sewing by the fire.Of the three surviving sisters, it was Emily who had the pleasantest life. Charlotte and Anne both endured long, unhappy stints away from home as schoolteachers and governesses (the “asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs”, Charlotte complained of her pupils. She was perhaps not temperamentally suited to moulding young minds) whereas Emily, after a brief teaching stint aged 20, was mostly allowed to remain at home.Why the special treatment? The family seemed to consider her too headstrong for regular employment (“This is slavery I fear she will never stand,” Charlotte said). She certainly sounds like a fearsome creature, striding round the countryside with her dogs Grasper and Keeper, whom she sketched with great tenderness and beat when they misbehaved, bringing home wild geese and feral cats.She ran the household, gardening, ironing and baking, always with a pencil at her side. She was first and foremost a poet: by the age of 22 she had written about 72 poems, mostly on tiny scraps of paper she kept in her copious detachable pockets. Many of the preoccupations of Wuthering Heights appear in them, particularly her love affair with the moors by moonlight: “It seems strange that aught can lie/ Beyond its zone of silver sky.”The summer of 1845, when all three sisters reunited at Haworth, was their collective annus mirabilis: in a fantastically fertile-sounding workshop atmosphere, reading bits aloud to each other each evening, Charlotte (aged 29) wrote The Professor and Jane Eyre, Emily (aged 27) wrote Wuthering Heights and Anne (aged 25) wrote Agnes Grey. It’s a shame, to my mind, that the books were initially rejected by multiple publishers because this gave Emily time to revise her manuscript, adding the grindingly repetitive second half of the novel.But the Brontës were ambitious and kept pushing: eventually in 1847, three of the books appeared at the parsonage, bound in plum-coloured cloth with gold lettering along the spines. The reviews of Wuthering Heights were, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly bad, although one critic praised its “savage grandeur” and Charlotte thought that in its “electrical atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe lightning”.Lutz has a nice, if slightly lush turn of phrase (Emily had to learn “to harness her devilish ferocity”) and is particularly good on weather, landscape and conjuring up sensory experiences. From newspaper records, she gives us a sense of the deadly snowstorms (“a mail-coach drove into a snowdrift, killing the coachman, guard and three horses”) and violent winds (“spray from the ocean over 70 miles away deposited a saline encrustation on windows”) that seeped into Emily’s imagination.As a biographer, however, Lutz has an occasional fondness for anachronistic scolding: Charlotte betrays “internalised misogyny” (well, it was 1840). She also shies away from addressing head on the central mystery of Emily’s life, which makes This Dark Night an informative but slightly stodgy read.With the exception of a year in a Brussels boarding school, which was hardly a den of iniquity, Emily lived a sheltered life at home, possibly without any romantic experiences at all. Where on earth did Wuthering Heights, which is not just any but the English novel of undying erotic obsession, come from? As Muriel Spark, whose short 1960 book on the subject is pungent and stylish (worth seeking out too is Winifred Gerin’s excellent 1971 biography), puts it: “Theories about Emily Brontë are, perhaps, only exceeded in number by theories about Shakespeare.”All that early trauma certainly had something to do with it, plus the unruly atmosphere of the moors and a rich diet in Byron’s poetry. Then there are the famously bizarre and intricate fantasy worlds that Emily and Anne continued to write and act out well into their twenties. Gondal sounds a bit Game of Thrones-y with its exotically named characters (Julius Brenzaida, Augusta G Almeda), battles, murders and extravagant lovesickness. Today, the shy teenage Brontës might have got very into internet fan fiction, but as it was, they had to build their own worlds from scratch, training from which Emily emerged with an extraordinarily muscular imagination.She died just before Christmas 1848, aged 30, possibly from tuberculosis, followed only five months later by heartbroken Anne. What else might Emily have written had she lived long enough for that wild imagination to mature? She was working on a second novel, which disappeared along with the rest of her papers, although in a pleasing flight of fancy Lutz imagines it could still exist somewhere, “stashed behind wall panels” or buried on the moors by its secretive, solitary writer.“You said I killed you — haunt me then!” Heathcliff rages, in desperate search of Cathy’s ghost. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë gave us one of the great ghost stories. Nice to think she’s out on those moors somewhere, dog by her side, pencil in hand. (Susie Goldsbrough)
50 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys1966This postcolonial prequel to Jane Eyre takes up the story of the first Mrs Rochester. Swapping Charlotte Brontë’s cold, dark gothic for the oppressive sunshine of the Caribbean, Dominica-born Rhys reimagines Brontë’s notorious “madwoman in the attic” as a Creole heiress called Antoinette Cosway. After decades of obscurity, its critical success propelled Rhys back into the spotlight at the age of 76, with Angela Carter hailing the novel as “a complete reimagining of what literature can do”.First sentence“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”
20 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë1847Emerald Fennell’s maximalist, sexed-up film divided opinions on its release in February. The source text – Brontë’s only novel – was published under the pen name Ellis Bell, and was similarly polarising among its Victorian audience for its depiction of the destructive relationship of its antiheroes, Heathcliff and Cathy, and its moral ambivalence. Set on the blustery Yorkshire moors, it is considered a classic of gothic literature.First sentence“1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”
8 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë1847The tale of poor governess Jane, her unlikely love affair with Mr Rochester, and the madwoman in his attic was a bestseller on publication. (Her sister Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights came out two months later.) Published under the pen name Currer Bell, its innovative first-person narrative, gothic and erotic themes thrilled contemporary readers.First sentence“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Eliot herself is a wise and gracious voice in the novel, breaking the fourth wall to remind us to look or think more carefully. For her, shifting point of view was not so much a literary technique as a moral obligation. Empathy is an overused word today, but for Eliot it was almost a religion. She had lost her faith, but showed that divinity can be found through true fellow feeling.This moral seriousness is sometimes mistaken for moralising, and Eliot as dull and preachy. Although admired, she is not held with the same affection as Austen or Dickens; her novels don’t lend themselves so readily to TV or film. They are not embedded in the public imagination like those of the Brontës. Neither Kate Bush nor Charli xcx felt moved to write pop songs about Middlemarch.
Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, “anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged”. Virginia Woolf famously declared it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. OK, it is not as obviously passionate as Wuthering Heights (it is never going to have a soundtrack by Charli xcx), at No 20 on our list, or as fun as Pride and Prejudice (at nine). But all human life is here. (Lisa Allardice)
On the other hand, there is the failure of which “Wuthering Heights” is accused by audience members aplenty – a departure from the source material so pronounced that the overlap between the works would not suffice to draw a Venn diagram from.Harsh? I would say so. The focal point of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation is the tumultuous relationship between characters Catherine and Heathcliff, the very same placed at centre stage by many readers – and most film-length adaptations – since the book’s publication. Given the popularity of this romance as a focal point, I think that to base a criticism of Emerald Fennell’s film on her making the “emotional subtext [of the book] as explicit and viscous as possible” is to miss the nub of the actual problem. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is viscous, and it is explicit – and there is nothing wrong with that. The writing and direction embrace the emboldening title of a re-imagining from start to finish; the film’s costuming and set design are lavish, flirtatious with anachronisms, dream-like at times, and, when viewed altogether, very camp. From its very title, Fennell indicates that this is her intention, and from scouring the web for production interviews, I found next to nothing indicating otherwise. I would even suggest that viscosity and explicitness are two of Fennell’s strengths. [...]Why on earth is Fennell’s choice of material to treat derivatively so limited?Make no mistake. This is not a criticism of falling into the valley of redundancy – at least not in the sense usually applied to adaptations. It is a criticism of the limited scope of Fennell’s signature style of deviance. Fennell’s films bring into awe-inspiring and uncomfortably focal excess the latent sensuality of a setting that contains or is associated with repression. My main point of comparison here is Saltburn, which bounces between the innocent, sexless, honey-coloured spires of Oxford, and the cushioned walls of a wealthy family’s estate. All the while, jealous, obsessive, and often obscene idol-worship emerges slowly from its initial disguise of college romance. “Wuthering Heights”, for as much of it is brought on-screen, takes advantage of the modern audience’s advanced palate for sex to push the boundaries of public display to a new extreme. Voyeuristic masturbation, in real-time, is the audience’s first taste of Catherine and Heathcliff’s adult relationship. Once again, Fennell joins obsession with romance in a very telling way. That much is creditable – that is where the film is made, unmistakably, her own. But that is where the making stops.If my criticism were purely scope-based, I admit that it should apply just as much to other adaptations of the novel. Emily Brontë’s intricate expansion of the web in the second half of Wuthering Heights proper, creating a second generation of Earnshaws, Heathcliffs, Lintons, and everyone in between, is scarcely dealt with in popular culture, leaving stock images of the ill-fated, tragic soulmates Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff to occupy the cultural psyche. My edition of Wuthering Heights has 316 pages – in my notes, I write that “halfway thru (sic) the book at 167 and we’ve finished the movie”. This in itself, I want to emphasise, is not my criticism. I could not snub “Wuthering Heights” for being a mise en abyme if no previous adaptation has truly escaped said abyme either. Enclosing her title in scare quotes is about as explicit a disclaimer Fennell could have given – as openly acknowledged in her interview with Claire Valentine McCartney, the film is an attempt to “make sense” of just one “tiny piece” of the novel’s vastness. If she wants to make the most of a small part of the book for a contemporary audience, more power to her.What I shall criticise Fennell for is that her style of abyme-escapism would be so well-suited to the remainder of the text, and this neglect makes the entire film lacklustre in context. It is a sexy and stylish film, but from Fennell I would expect more than sex and style – I hoped, I think fairly, for innovation. A director whose signature is extracting and drawing out from her source the taboo topic of sex, and demonstrating with discomfitting proximity that we the audience are perhaps not as comfortable with the subject as we like to think, could have taken the opportunity presented by such a thematically rich text to bypass what Rahul Menon of ScriptMag dubs “[terror] of [her] own source material”. She could have put to the audience’s scrutiny – and tested our postmodern, non-censorial sensibilities – an equally frank handling of the topics of abuse, of familial incest in physical, mental, and figurative forms, of perversion of nature and its optionality and of sadism. New and demanding ground? Yes. But Fennell is a capable director, so why not make the demand? Instead, as Rahul notes, Fennell’s take skirts even the more contemporarily common social subjects of racism or classism, both included just as explicitly by Brontë as the less “popular” social subjects.What a fabulously subversive film we might have had – and, in terms of the qualities unique to an adaptation, what a great addition of value to the film canon – if Fennell had brought her proven capability and eye for subtlety to the tapestry of interwoven taboos that is the novel Heights. But, returning to the question of whether the quality of an adaptation affects its quality as a standalone film – although I should say, once and for all, that I think not – I am afraid that sex is the only live bird in Fennell’s film. Her nest is otherwise, to quote the novel, “full of little skeletons.” (T. Sehgal)
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Hasta el 12 de julio puedes recorrer las muestras “Literatura gótica” y “El mágico mundo de los libros de Harry Potter” en nuestra Fundación Cultural.El primer recorrido rinde tributo a la literatura gótica y a su extensa tradición a través de los siglos, desde grandes clásicos como Cumbres borrascosas, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein y Drácula, hasta su influencia contemporánea en la obra de autoras como Samanta Schweblin, Anne Rice o Agustina Bazterrica. Un viaje a través de conceptos claves de este género narrativo como el amor, el monstruo y la muerte.Para todos los fanáticos de Harry Potter tienen la oportunidad de disfrutar del mágico mundo de sus libros, rememorando pasajes icónicos del universo literario que partió con la publicación de Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal en 1997.
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English author Emily Brontë is best known for her novel “Wuthering Heights,” a multigenerational story of obsession, revenge and love set in the Yorkshire moors. “This Dark Night,” the first full-length biography of Brontë in over 20 years and written by Penn State Professor of English Deborah Lutz, draws on Brontë’s formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts to bring new light to the author’s tragic and fiercely independent life.Lutz, the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature, discussed in the following Q&A her new biography of Brontë and why readers still obsess over her novel nearly 200 years later.Q: Who was Emily Brontë?Lutz: Brontë grew up in a family of writers, and she collaborated with her siblings on all of her work. Both “Wuthering Heights” and her sister Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” grew out of this shared writing space. While she composed her great, gothic novel, with its gloomy passions, she did chores around the house — sewing her own clothing, making bread and cleaning the parlor. In “This Dark Night,” I evoke her as an embodied self; I ask, what was it like to be in a woman’s body in 1830s and 1840s West Yorkshire? What were the sounds, smells, the feelings along the skin?Q: Why continue to study her almost 200 years after her death?Lutz: New lovers of her novel “Wuthering Heights” appear every day, it seems! And so much new research over the past 30 years changes the way we see her. She knew queer people, like Anne Lister — called Gentleman Jack and recently was the subject of her own HBO series — a local lesbian. And the character Heathcliff was likely based on a person of color, possibly the child of an enslaved person passing through Liverpool — a major stop for ships involved in the slave trade. When he first arrives in the novel, after being found on the streets of Liverpool, he is speaking a foreign language and is described as “black,” a “gypsy” and with the appearance of an Indian sailor. Brontë also witnessed the beginnings of the climate crisis. Textile mills and mining in her area polluted the air and streams, and some of the birds she so loved were going extinct.Q: What new insights did you discover in your research? Any surprises?Lutz: I was surprised at how much she revised “Wuthering Heights,” since it’s easy to imagine it coming from her fully formed. But it went through distinct versions, and she really labored over it.But also how quickly she wrote it! She finished it in about two years. And then, after her death, Charlotte revised it again, when it was reprinted. Charlotte had always been ashamed of the novel, finding it coarse, violent and immature. She made it more conventional by stringing together short paragraphs and smoothing out the local speech. This seemed like a real betrayal of her sister, given that Emily had her own eccentric voice and Charlotte tried to tame it.Q: The new “Wuthering Heights” movie starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi recently hit streaming. Any thoughts about the film or why we keep returning to it two centuries later?Lutz: The new film is a visual feast and the costumes and interiors are amazing. It seemed a shame, though, that only about 5% of the dialogue comes from the novel. The novel is mainly oral — it's a tale full of people talking to one another — so it’s a missed opportunity to ignore most of Brontë’s text. It was also a shame to have Heathcliff played by a white actor. It’s fairly unusual for a great Victorian novel to have a major character who is a person of color, and I think today filmmakers should run with that. (Francisco Tutella)
Speaking to Sandgren first, he detailed the creative process behind the film’s visual language, the use of weather as an emotional tool, and the technical decision to shoot on VistaVision and Sandgren details the creative process behind the film’s visual language, the use of weather as an emotional tool, and the technical decision to shoot on VistaVision and 35mm film.When asked about Fennell’s approach to the film, Sandgren stated, “We were about to design a film from scratch from her sort of mind… everything—and you will talk maybe with Suzie about it—but how she built sets just from a fantasy version of how she basically saw it.”With the movie notably shot on film, that choice also had a key reason. Sandgren explained it, “Emerald really felt that the grain was needed for the emotional story… in my opinion, 16 millimeter is the most poetic emotional of all of those usually because… there’s some nostalgia or something that is helping you feel the texture of the skin.”Of course, with this film, Sandgren had to work with VistaVision cameras. For that format, as he stated, “What’s good with VistaVision for us was that we could have the same film stock and the same format and then just have a VistaVision camera. To me, like everything you—every decision you make should have a reason… usually in emotional stories I think it always helps with film so far… to create that sort of—that you’re actually watching an impression of reality and not reality.”Sandgren had plenty more to say about the production, including how the film’s visual style was built around “heightened realism,” using a stage-bound environment to create a “magical” and “surreal” atmosphere. Key emotional beats were emphasized through weather motifs. Production designer Susie Davies further expanded this. For Davies, the key was the process of building the film’s “heightened, surreal” world on a soundstage, her meticulous approach to designing the contrasting environments of the Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and the close-knit collaboration between herself, the cinematographer, and the set decorator.Again, commenting on that “heightened realism,” Davies noted, “We were aiming for that sliver between reality and unreality. And when you’re on a soundstage, we aimed to make it feel real. We didn’t want anyone really to know, but ultimately… You end up with this weird sliver between reality and unreality.”Davies also recognized that this was something Fennell had wanted to do since her younger days. With that in mind, “This whole world building, you know, this teenage lens that we were going to show this story through, bringing to life her imagination was extraordinary.”As a great way to set things up for production designer Charlotte Dirickx, Davies talks about this continued collaboration. As she states, “She’s a real perfectionist, whereas I might cut corners for speed. She knows when to hold fast or, you know, her wealth of knowledge is like nothing else… yeah, she’s extraordinary and so talented with her eye.”For Dirckix, the experience did have its challenges. As she states, “The production involved highly unusual props and set details, spanning from real fish accented with lipstick set in resin jellies to massive fake strawberries crafted from cake. For the outdoor sets, the team referenced the stagey atmosphere of Florence Yoch’s gardens from Gone with the Wind and Fragonard’s painting The Swing, adding 12-foot weaves of dried gypsophila to construct a dreamlike background.This also spoke to the anachronistic take that was key to Fennell’s vision. “…We would take like a period shape, say for the furniture, but then upholster it in a kind of different or more modern fabric. So you’ve always got that slight jarring going on.”It’s this wide variety of choices that allows for the movie to stand out as much as it did in theaters. I was quite the fan and would have been happy spending so much more time with each of these three to dive even further into what the process of making so many exciting choices to realize this fully realized version of the world, originating with Emily Brontë and reimagined here by Fennell, was like. Given that all of these craftspeople worked on Saltburn as well, I’ll certainly be curious to see what they all tackle next. (Aaron Neuwirth)
I finally caught the latest film adaptation of Wuthering Heights last week and even though I knew it had been divisive I was still disappointed in a way I hadn’t imagined. I was prepared for the film to be tacky and over the top and too much, and that didn’t faze me at all. I welcomed it. The source material demands it, in fact. But I cannot forgive the fact that in the 2026 version of Wuthering Heights there is absolutely no haunting.What is Wuthering Heights without ghosts? It becomes a mildly sordid tale of the romance between two very beautiful people that ends when one of them dies, and it also makes Kate Bush’s song of the same name make no sense at all. A non-Gothic Wuthering Heights is a particularly odd choice because I’d assumed the auteur Emerald Fennell would have jumped at the chance to explore Heathcliff’s despair for dead Cathy throughout his troubled life and use his pain as an opportunity to get really weird. I still can’t believe Saltburn is still the only Emerald Fennell film with a very dirty graveside wanking scene.Ending Wuthering Heights at Cathy’s death is like ending The Great Gatsby after the big party, or ending The Secret History at the bacchanal. There is so much more that happens afterward—and it’s the uglier, messier parts that make great fiction great. As it stands the latest movie version is simply too pretty, with all of its rougher edges flattened out. I suppose I should have expected this, given that the role of Catherine is played by Barbie herself (Margot Robbie), after all.Fennell’s film is just one example of a phenomenon adjacent to whitewashing in film that I’ll call hot-washing. There’s nothing new about Hollywood adaptations featuring profoundly good-looking people, but film stars used to be made to look a bit more… regular, particularly before plastic surgery made the faces of so many A-list actresses look eerily similar.Hot-washing is when source material that’s complicated has its edges smoothed out by the casting of conventionally hot people who are made to look conventionally hot in a way that clashes with the source material, and it’s ruining a bunch of recent literary adaptations whose characters are meant to seem a little more real. Imagine if Bridget Jones’s Diary were remade in 2026 with Sydney Sweeney as the title character. (Maris Kreizman)
A contributor to Los Angeles Times writes about her 'bucket-list trip to Yorkshire'.This film is everything the book is not. It doesn’t adapt the novel so much as it uses it almost loosely as a starting point, and then turns the entire material upside down. Emily Brontë never imagined that her Cathy would be played by a Barbie-era actress, with a Charli XCX score blaring in the background, accompanied by an Australian Heathcliff and a boudoir-esque Isabella. In fact, there is reason to speculate that she would not be fond of any of these twists of events. Naturally, fans of her work aren’t either.The biggest disconnect comes from how the film markets itself: “the greatest love story ever told”. Yet, that’s never what the original story was. “Wuthering Heights” is not a romance in the traditional sense. It’s a cautionary tale about obsessive love, cycles of abuse, domination, vengeance, and the way toxicity echoes across generations. It’s about how that kind of love doesn’t just destroy the people involved, but everyone around them as well. The only sense of peace comes when those patterns are finally partially broken.Catherine and Heathcliff are often mistaken for the ultimate romantic ideal, but their connection is rooted in possession, mutual destruction, and something almost brutally confusing. It’s about the faint possibility of redemption through the next generation. The novel focuses on class difference, racism and discrimination, and deteriorating mental health. It never romanticises the eventual psychosis.However, the movie barely explores these dynamics. Instead, it leans heavily into the intensity that comes with yearning. And yes, there is a lot of it, particularly crafted for the female gaze.I would actually argue that there is too much of it. The cast is perfectly capable of adapting their lines, but on screen, their chemistry is reduced to just playing dialogue. It pushes a narrative of forbidden love that is absent because of the plot lines that the movie doesn’t adapt.There is an interesting, unexpected positive note, though, which is the visuals. The direction is unapologetically bold. Emerald Fennell rejects the muted minimalism that a lot of modern films lean into and instead embraces a loud, saturated, and almost overwhelming aesthetic. The use of colour is striking: Cathy’s skin against her crimson outfits that represent her inner turmoil, the deliberate clashing tones, and the heightened tone of the palette that turns every frame into something picturesque.There isn’t a single scene or outfit that wasn’t carefully placed or thought out. The film uses vast, evocative backdrops to conjure a kind of sentimentality that feels aptly grand. A few instances that come to mind are the colder scenery changes during the lowest pivots, as well as Cathy’s room, which resembles the veins beneath our skin. The latter, in particular, perfectly articulates her eventual descent. Even the stylistic choices, like the almost anachronistic elements and the unexpected costume influences, add to the film’s identity, allowing it to go beyond the boundaries of traditional period drama.At times, it feels like the film is more interested in being seen than being understood and strangely, that’s where it succeeds the most. Even when the narrative falters, the imagery carries it. You could honestly watch this film purely for its cinematography and walk away satisfied.“Wuthering Heights”— intentionally titled with quotation marks—exists here as more of an idea than an adaptation. A reinterpretation, a reimagining that prioritises emotion, aesthetics, and atmosphere over fidelity. Emerald Fennel said her goal was to capture the experience of a teenage girl reading a romance book for the first time. She clarified several times that she has no intention of adapting the book but rather depicting her own interpretation of it. Watching the movie with that in mind might leave less shock and bitterness, and could even satisfy a cinephile who prefers the visuals. (Tinath Zaeba)
Brontë CountryIt is difficult to imagine a fictional tale more gothic, inspirational and remarkable than that of three brilliant sisters who lived in relative isolation on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, secretly battling their socially conscripted futures by writing poems and novels that they dared not publish under their own names.Two of those novels — ”Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë and “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, are still considered masterworks, influencing subsequent generations and endlessly adapted for film and television. (In the ultimate Yorkshire crossover, Wainwright wrote the breathtaking two-part Brontë biopic “To Walk Invisible,” which everyone should see.)The Brontë Parsonage Museum, and the town of Haworth which it overlooks, is very much a tourist attraction. An information annex, gift shop and public restroom have been added behind it, but once you enter the small garden that stands between the parsonage’s front door and St. Michael and All Angels’ Church, you are in another world.In 1820, Patrick Brontë, recently appointed incumbent of St. Michael, moved his wife, Maria, and their six children into the parsonage where they all lived for the rest of their natural (albeit in most cases, short) lives. Maria died in 1821; the two older children, Maria and Elizabeth, died four years later after being sent to a typhoid-plagued school Charlotte would pillory as Lowood in “Jane Eyre.”The museum is meticulously restored to reflect the years that the surviving children — Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell, the only son — were young adults. The dining room table, where the sisters wrote, is strewn with manuscripts, quill pens and tea cups; a bonnet and shawl bedeck a chair in the small kitchen. Patrick had his own study but it is difficult to imagine three women being able to write separate works, never mind classics, in such close quarters. Ironically, only Branwell’s room, papered with sketches and poems, looks like an artist’s refuge.Unlike his three sisters, Branwell, his artistic career stunted by alcoholism and an opium addiction, never published. He died of tuberculosis in 1848 at 31.If any place should be haunted, it is the Brontë parsonage. Shortly after Branwell’s funeral (and just a year after “Wuthering Heights” was published), 30-year-old Emily also died of tuberculosis, expiring on the sofa that stands beside the dining room table. A few months later, after the publication of her second novel, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” Anne, 29, succumbed to the disease in nearby Scarborough, just south of Whitby.Charlotte, who wrote two more novels after “Jane Eyre,” was the only sister to be celebrated during her lifetime. She married and then died at the parsonage in 1855 at 38 of complications from her first pregnancy. Only Patrick lived to old age — 84 — dying in 1861 in the home where he had served for 41 years.But it is not a sad house; instead visitors are left to wonder at the genius, resolution and audacity that roiled the quiet rooms and halls where the sisters secretly wrote and sent out their manuscripts, all initially under the the names of Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell.The steeply descending main street of Haworth is filled with tea shops, pubs and stores clearly dedicated to pleasing Brontë pilgrims, but its basic form, including the original stationery store where the sisters once bought their paper, remains the same.As do the moors that stretch behind the parsonage. On a walk to the Brontë Waterfall (more like a small but still lovely rill) and Top Withens, the ruin of a 16th century farmhouse believed to have inspired “Wuthering Heights,” the wild silence and sweeping vistas are even more transporting than the parsonage. One imagines not the ghost of Cathy or Heathcliff, but a trio of women, very much alive and striding through the heather, their minds alight with the stories they would tell, set among similar terrain. (Mary McNamara)
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by Emma Connally-BarklemBlack Cat Poetry PressCover by @emilyingondalThe High Flight: 50 Poems Inspired by Emily Brontë’s Hawk is a poetry collection by Emma Conally-Barklem that draws inspiration from the legend of Emily Brontë’s beloved hawk, Nero. Through fifty poems, the book explores the wildness, imagination, and emotional intensity associated with Brontë’s world, blending literary homage with a strong sense of nature and place.‘By turns mythic, soaring, earthbound and unyielding, this collection is a dazzling addition to the Brontë canon.’Karen Powell, author of Fifteen Wild Decembers‘A truly astonishing collection bristling with piercing insight and originality- this is Conally-Barklem at the height of her powers’Sharon Wright, journalist and Brontë biographer‘One of the most interesting British poets working today’Graham Watson, author of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë
4. The Chateau on Sunset by Natasha LesterRelease date: June 2Read if you liked: Eligible by Curtis SittenfeldIt’s been a while since I lost sleep over a book that was not a mystery—and Natasha Lester’s glamorous retelling of Jane Eyre did it for me. Lester’s novel transports us to the sparkling world of Hollywood and the most famous hotel on the Sunset Strip. Aria Jones has spent her entire life being invisible in the Chateau Marmont. But when a brooding rockstar buys the hotel she calls home, Aria quickly finds that what she thought she wanted is anything but. (Marissa Wu)
Emerald Fennel's [sic] Wuthering Heights is divisive at best, with its radical reinterpretation of Emily Brontë's classic, but no one can deny the sizzling chemistry between its two leads. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the ill-fated Catherine and Heathcliff raised eyebrows, as the romance between the two took a steamy, intimate turn, ultimately ending in tragedy for everyone around them.Wuthering Heights got backlash for turning Cathy and Heathcliff's destructive dynamic into something romantic, and there were concerns about casting all-white characters, particularly Heathcliff, who had been described as a dark-skinned man. Even so, Wuthering Heights had hearts racing, and thankfully, there are several more great steamy romantic titles to choose from to recreate that feeling. (Fawzia Khan)
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Fri 15 May, 5:30pmBrontë Parsonage MuseumJoin us to look closely at a series of drawings and prints by British Modernist Edna Clarke Hall (1877-1979), whose obsession with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights inspired her for decades. Art historian Eliza Goodpasture will bring these works to life in the context of early twentieth-century British art, as well as the artist’s own life. She yearned for the passion she found in Brontë’s novel, which was always missing from her own Victorian marriage. Working with both expressive watercolours and printmaking techniques, she made hundreds of works inspired by Wuthering Heights, some of which are now in the Parsonage’s collection.Eliza Goodpasture is an art historian and writer. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She holds a PhD from the University of York.
A somewhat divergent take on the Emily Brontë classic, Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" mixes soapy, anachronistic plot elements into the novel's brew of class issues, generational trauma and forbidden, star-crossed love. The story of rich girl Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the foundling boy her father brings home one day, has been told many times before — but never quite in this florid manner. It's not restrained, and it's anything but civilized — but it is a lush visual feast laden with passion that will liven up an afternoon.If you loved this take on "Wuthering Heights," then you're probably going to be intrigued by other frankly-written stories about anachronistic historical heroines, or erotic tales of frustrated love. This list of five films contain heartbreaking tales of lovers who are felled by miscommunication, stubbornness, bad luck and other forms of havoc which ruin — and sometimes resurrect — their sublime faith in togetherness. Whether true love has its say or not, these five films will definitely appeal to anyone who had a good time watching "Wuthering Heights.'Jane Eyre"Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" are both beloved books that have multiple movie adaptations — 47 versions of the former exist to the latter's 30. The 2011 big-screen version of "Jane Eyre" will appeal to people who loved the 2026 edition of "Wuthering Heights" because it knows how to ratchet up the melodrama while leaving you invested in the impossible love story between Jane (Mia Wasikowska) and Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbender, in one of his best movies). It's more serious and certainly more genteel than "Wuthering," but no less intense for that sense of reserve.The film follows Jane as she becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, located deep in the moorland. She is an orphan whose cruel childhood has formed her into a woman of staunch but caring character. Yet she's unprepared for the secrets that Edward harbors, even as she begins to fall in love with him. Ultimately, she must have the courage to run from Edward's vagaries — even if it means shedding their fragile new bond. (Melissa Lemieux)
HBO Max has become the Jacob Elordi channel, first with Euphoria and now with the success of Wuthering Heights. The controversial adaptation of Emily Brontë’s seminal novel was met with division. The period piece was such a wild departure from the book that it could hardly be called an adaptation at all.While Wuthering Heights is admittedly climbing the streaming charts, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best example of Elordi’s work. Already an Oscar nominee, the actor is one to watch. Sadly, his best role to date was one that passed many viewers by in Sofia Coppola’s A24 film, Priscilla. (Carolyn Jenkins)
We had two readings from books (I suppose we had a slight literary theme for our wedding). I read from the final chapter of Jane Eyre, which begins with the famous line “Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had, he and I, the parson and the clerk, were alone present.” (Deirdre McArdle)
Xiaoyan DongThe Yeats Journal of Korea (한국 예이츠 저널) Vol.79 (2026.04) pp.33-50This paper examines Jane Eyre, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Mrs. Dalloway as primary texts for a comparative study of female identity under structural oppression. Situating each heroine within her distinct historical context—Victorian England, the mid-twentieth-century American South, and early twentieth-century Britain—the analysis traces how Jane Eyre, Blanche DuBois, and Clarissa Dalloway navigate the intersecting pressures of social institutions, economic dependency, and family structures. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power and Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, the study identifies three distinct modes through which patriarchal power operates: visible coercion, internalized discipline, and total erasure. It then examines the forms of self-alienation these modes produce and the corresponding strategies of resistance each woman develops within her structural constraints. By bringing these three figures into sustained parallel analysis, female identity under patriarchy emerges not as a single story of victimhood but as a differentiated spectrum of entrapment and agency, yielding a more precise understanding of how women negotiate and reconstruct selfhood under systemic oppression.
MovieWeb reports that Greenland 2 has dethroned Wuthering Heights 2026 as the most popular movie on HBO Max.Located in Thornton, its official opening was marked by a visit from HM Queen Camilla as part of a Royal Visit.During her time at the house, Her Majesty met with committee members and volunteers, signed the guestbook, and unveiled a commemorative plaque.In celebration of the anniversary, a new exhibition will open on Friday, May 15, featuring a framed piece of wallpaper dating back to 1890 discovered during the property’s restoration.Anna Gibson, general manager, said: "We have had the most incredible first year at the Brontë Birthplace and have invited people from across the world to see this very special place."From a forgotten house on a village street, it has now become an internationally renowned literary centre protecting the Brontës’ legacy and inspiring generations to come."The birthplace has attracted national and international media attention over the past year, with features in The Times, The Telegraph, and on BBC One’s The One Show.A range of events have also taken place, including a standout performance by internationally acclaimed musician Guiem Soldevila and his group, who set 12 Brontë poems to music.The house has hosted two artists in residence: Chicago-born Garrett Wild and digital artist Sam Sharp.Committee member Chris Raine also delivered a talk about the Brontë Birthplace in Japan.Other notable speakers have included Ann Dinsdale, principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage; author Sharon Wright; writer and illustrator Dr Eleanor Houghton; Helen MacEwan of the Brussels Brontë Group; Dr Michael O’Dowd from the Banagher Brontë Group; and storyteller Irene Lofthouse.Literary fans have had the chance to own a piece of history, with original beams from the house offered for sale.The sale is helping to boost income for the house.Siblings Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë were all born at the house on Market Street.The building was acquired through the combined support of more than 700 individual investors and funding from Bradford City of Culture 2025, the Community Ownership Fund, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and the Rural England Prosperity Fund.It is now managed by Brontë Birthplace Limited, a Community Benefit Society. (Harry Williams)
Ever since it landed on HBO Max, Margot Robbie's newest R-Rated hit has been a streaming sensation. However, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and this past weekend, the film fell victim to a new post-apocalyptic arrival that quickly knocked Robbie's spicy smash down a peg. Today, it's down another rung on the ladder thanks to another movie that ties directly into HBO Max's latest success.Taking in $242 million at the box office earlier this year, Robbie's Wuthering Heights is a loose adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel of the same name. Also starring Jacob Elordi, the film follows the intense and destructive bond between Catherine Earnshaw and the orphaned Heathcliff. Featuring way more heat than Brontë ever could have imagined, the film was a big hit with audiences, earning a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics were more unforgiving of the darker interpretation of the classic story, rating it just 57%.Added to HBO Max on May 1, Wuthering Heights found continued success on streaming following its box office run. The Gothic romance held the #1 spot in the Top 10 in the United States for nearly two weeks, and still sits in first place on the global charts. That being said, its stranglehold on the North American list finally came to an end this past weekend thanks to none other than Gerard Butler. (James Melzer)
The track, which opens Charli XCX's Wuthering Heights album, pulses with a sense of growing dread, building from isolated, creaking strings to a blazing crescendo. (A "Wall of Sound," if you will.) To listen to it is to feel the same sense of confinement and madness present in Emily Brontë's novel. While I had my worries about Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" going into the theater, I was still excited to see how she deployed "House."Mere minutes into the movie, I got my answer, and I was underwhelmed."House" plays during the opening minutes of "Wuthering Heights," in which young Cathy and Nelly (Charlotte Mellington and Vy Nguyen) attend a frenzied hanging, then tear across the moors back to Wuthering Heights. The song fades as we get our first glimpse of the film's titular estate, a darkened blot against hulking rock crags.The song remains a banger, especially as the film version incorporates extra orchestrations by Anthony Willis. But while the song establishes a fittingly bleak tone for the rest of the film, its placement is odd. Why is this extremely claustrophobic track being used over a shot of Cathy and Nelly running with wild abandon across the vast moors? Why does this introspective, harrowing song serve as the soundtrack to a rowdy crowd scene? The visuals and song are separately entrancing, but they do not mesh. There's no sense of creeping dread or isolation. It's just Fennell throwing the song's climax at us in the hopes of overloading our senses. Unfortunately, in doing so, Charli XCX and Cale's refrain of "I think I'm gonna die in this house" loses its potency.It's not like Fennell couldn't have used "House" anywhere else. Cathy worries about wasting away in Wuthering Heights with her ruined father (Martin Clunes) before she meets Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Then, once at Thrushcross Grange, she realizes she's in a gilded prison. Not to be too literal, but if you have a song named "House," maybe tie it to a character's relationship to one of the film's two central houses!(After all, if my new husband painted my room the exact color of my face, mole and all, my reaction would absolutely be, "I think I'm gonna die in this house.")While Fennell doesn't use "House" to its highest potential, at least TikTok is on the case. The song has become a meme online, used to soundtrack moments of despair or unsettling images. (Belen Edwards)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: The Original Refusal to Be SmallLet's be real: Jane Eyre has been igniting personal revolutions in readers for nearly two centuries, and it shows absolutely no signs of stopping. A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzles and shocks readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom. Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit.There's something almost radical about a Victorian novel that still feels urgently relevant in 2026. The questions Jane asks, about self-worth, about whether love should cost you your dignity, cut straight to the bone. When she finds love with her sardonic employer Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving the man she loves? Every reader who has ever faced a similar crossroads knows exactly what that feels like. (Matthias Binder)
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Keighley and District Local History Society presentsMay 13, 2026 @ 7:15 pm – 8:45 pmKeighley Civic CentreMay’s History Society meeting is on Wednesday 13th May 2026. It will include a talk from Brontë Parsonage Museum’s Principal Curator, Ann Dinsdale. Ann lectures and writes on aspects of the Brontës’ lives and social conditions in mid-nineteenth century Haworth. But on this occasion, her talk will focus on how the museum operates – a subject she is well-versed to talk on, having been working at the museum for over twenty years.The meeting will take place upstairs in the Civic Centre, on North Street. Doors open at 7.15pm and the meeting will start just before 7.30pm. Entry is free to History Society members, or £3.50 for anyone else who wants to just come along (booking is not required). Members can also choose to join the meeting via Zoom if they wish.
Wuthering Heights may be a love it/hate it type of movie considering all its polarizing opinions, but no matter what you think about it, one thing is pretty undeniable. It’s got style, and it’s got vision. After having a blast watching it in a theater packed with women earlier this year, I revisited it on streaming with an HBO Max subscription, and one thing I noticed even more this time is how Cathy’s fits stay true to one color palette the whole time, and I think it’s worth diving into.Of course, I couldn’t take my eyes off of all of Cathy’s clothes going full bodice core during both viewings, but this time all the coordination was impossible to look away from. [...]So, what’s up with these particular colors? While I would have theorized it would have something to do with red being the shade associated with passion and desire, when CinemaBlend spoke to writer/director Emerald Fennell, she had some interesting thoughts about why she dressed Margot Robbie in the same palette throughout. In her words:"When it comes to the color palette of the clothes, for example, it made sense that Cathy makes an imprint on the world that she's in. Cathy kind of like burns an image onto any space. And so, we wanted to make sure that her clothes were very graphic. So they're black, white, red and occasionally like a silver, because she's always sort of an indelible shape."Now this is interesting. Cathy needed to “burn” through every moment on screen. During the filmmaker’s chat with us, she also spoke about how the expression of a character’s personality through something like clothing is very specific to Gothic cinema. The genre often evokes intensity that we wouldn’t see in other movies, so the lavish use of red is all part of it. You can check out her full thoughts below:As she says, it’s not just about the costumes. It was also through the textures she decided to use throughout the sets. I know I’ll never forget this movie’s skin wall, which was actually fashioned out of actual scans of Robbie’s own skin to represent what it feels like for Cathy to be a “collector’s item” to her husband once she gets married.Fennell’s explanation of the Gothic genre also helps make sense of some of the objects in the movie being exaggerated sizes or how long we have to wait for Cathy and Heathcliff to kiss. Everything is more dramatic and hyperbolic than you’d expect from other movies.I don’t know about you, but I really appreciate Emerald Fennell’s eye for making her films very distinct, and Wuthering Heights knocks it out of the park in that respect. (Sarah El-Mahmoud)
'Jane Eyre' (Cary Fukunaga, 2011) – FilminApasionado drama de Charlotte Brontë que tiene en ésta la mejor versión cinematográfica que se ha hecho de su obra cumbre, Jane Eyre. Mia Wasikowska en la piel de la importante heroína está espléndida, frágil y poderosa a partes iguales. Impecablemente realizada y profundamente poética, la presencia de Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell y Judi Dench elevan el filme a otro nivel. Una joya indiscutible del cine de este siglo. (Belén Ester) (Translation)
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Speaker: Irene Lofthouse (dressed as Nancy Garrs)Date: Tuesday 12 May 2026 6:30pmBrontë Birthplace / ZoomJoin nursemaid to the Brontës, Nancy Garrs, on a virtual walk to see Keighley through Brontë eyes.*PLEASE NOTE* Due to popular demand this talk will now be streamed live on Zoom. Please choose Standard for an in-person ticket and Digital for an online ticket. A recording will be sent out afterwards to all attendees.Why did the Brontës go to Keighley? How did they get there? Who did they visit? What was the town like at time: the people, the shops, the buildings? When would they make the journey?Discover where they shopped, heard and learned about music, found out about electricity, whooped with glee, developed drawing and painting skills, met and mixed with Keighley’s movers and shakers as well as the swelling number of migrants to the town.Based on Keighley Library’s ‘In the footsteps of the Brontës’ trail-booklet by Keighley Local Studies, Nancy Garrs will add her own comments on the Brontë family she knew at Thornton and Haworth.Irene Lofthouse is a first-generation Yorkshire lass of Irish heritage who has been telling tales since childhood. She has careered around many incarnations: caver, consultant, shoe-seller, storyteller, petrol-pumper, publisher amongst many others – but stories have been integral to them all. A cultural historian/researcher, writer, actor, Irene has appeared in a Ken Russell film, at the Edinburgh Fringe, featured on Radio 4, BBC Sounds, TV, stage, and at art/literature festivals performing her one-woman plays or giving talks. She’s particularly interested in making visible, invisible or forgotten lives and voices, in exploring new ways of seeing old stories and collaborating with literacy, historic agencies and universities to create accessible and fun learning resources. Co-founder of two community theatre groups, her poems and prose feature in many anthologies and she is a trustee of the JB Priestley Society, a trustee of the Undercliffe Cemetery Charity, a member of 26 Writers and The Friends of Bradford’s Becks.
